As a family man, finding a topic that can involve the kids may fit into your life better. If you like making, optical telescopes can be rewarding. There's the optics, telescope manufacturing and sky trackers (robotics). Nowadays digital photography goes with telescopes.

If you really want to contribute peripherally, there are lots of open data sets. Contributing code is especially useful.

In span of time between missions, there is usually incredible progress in a few key parameters, detector noise, spacial resolution, and frequency range. While you can argue that a "refueled" IRAS could beat down the noise by observing for years and years, changing out detectors and telescopes is effectively launching a new mission. Also, as our knowledge of astrophysics grows, we design missions to answer the unanswered questions. 10 years of IRAS is not necessarily as interesting as a couple of years of a significantly more advanced mission.

This is a great article describing how difficult it is to control systematic errors with clocks in this kind of Time Of Flight experiment. An undergraduate level of understanding of relativity is all that's required and it makes you think. Also contains some snarkiness.

Trust and faith or belief are not the same thing. I can trust people but still verify or need to verify the veracity of their assertions. Scientists rely on the network of trust among themselves but if something doesn't work they will call each other out on it. With faith, there is no need to verify. In fact, with faith I don't need trust because I'm not relying on the words of a man but my belief in the divine. This is different from following a demagogue, which is not faith but obedience.

nuckfuts writes: "An e-mail sent to abuse@facebook.com resulted in an automated response saying:

Unfortunately, the email address you are using to reach us is no longer available. In order to best assist you, we have provided avenues of support for specific issues that are located in our Help Center. Please follow the link that best suits your problem.

All the provided links require logging in to Facebook. Since I don't have a Facebook account, it appears I cannot report abuse. Is this not a violation of RFC2142 ?"

anymouse writes: "What should you do when you really, REALLY have to "go"? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science."